- (female announcer) Production funding for Behind the Headlines is made possible in part by the WKNO Production Fund, the WKNO Endowment Fund, and by viewers like you, thank you.

- The new mayor of Bartlett tonight on Behind the Headlines.

[intense orchestral music] I am Eric Barns with The Daily Memphian.

Thanks for joining us.

I am joined tonight by Bartlett City Mayor David Parsons.

Thanks for being here.

- Thank you, Eric.

- You are about what, 120, I think we were talking about, 120 days in, and you followed 20 years of Keith McDonald, who was a frequent guest on this show, especially back when school consolidation and deconsolidation were along, but also with other issues.

But we'll talk about some real specific issues.

You're going into budget season, some big picture issues around maybe Ford, and development, and so on.

But just for you, your priorities that people who maybe didn't follow the Bartlett Mayoral race, or those who did, your priorities as mayor are what over the next, what, almost four years?

- Next four years is crime, economic development, and really those two priorities is ones we're really drawing down on is crime and economic development.

- And crime in what sense?

'Cause people think of, well, there's a crime problem in most major cities, Memphis, very much included.

But sometimes people think of, well, the suburbs don't have a crime problem.

- Well, we have major roads that come through Bartlett and everybody, you turn the TV on every night and all they see is the crimes that you see all over the county.

And sometimes the people begin to, all over the campaign trail, we felt like people just got fearful that, hey, it's gonna come into our community, into our home.

And so we wanna make, we don't want only that perceived perception that they feel safe, but we wanna make sure that they are safe and making sure that we're staying on the cutting edge using all the resources, the tools, opportunities, grants that we have to make sure those officers have every tool and resource they need to be able to be effective in this new age of crime.

And actually, our violent crimes are down, we just reported earlier this year that violent crime is down about 30%, goes all the way back to around 2016, something like that.

But when you turn the news on every night, you see the car thefts and so forth like that, those tools, there's a lot of new tools.

The LPRs that we have.

- What's a LPR?

- A license plate reader.

- Oh, okay.

- And that lets the police department know when there is a stolen car entering the city or exiting the city.

- And what happens?

Drill down on that just so people follow.

Some of those are called flock cameras.

I know some various places have now, and it'll flag, it'll go to the realtime crime center or wherever, to the database, and MPD will come to a place, but I didn't know Bartlett was using that as well.

So a car comes into Bartlett, it gets tagged.

That's a stolen car, what happens next?

- It actually goes, I'm told it goes to the dashboard of the police officers.

And you may recall a couple of, probably about a month ago, we had an officer that got ran over, and actually that was in a stolen car.

And so they tried to follow that stolen car to find a safe location to try to apprehend the car and the suspect, and that individual, that was picked up on a camera.

And so we had them, I think that took place at IHOP out by the Wolfchase Mall where he had stopped, and waited 'til he stopped and tried to apprehend him, and he chose not to, and actually put the vehicle in drive, and ran over one of our officers, knocked him out of the way.

He was in an F-150 and actually ran over him.

But yeah, he was picked up because of that camera.

And so I'm told, through many resources, that if you can reduce, car thefts is the driver behind most of the burglaries that happen and take place.

For some reason or another, they want to steal a car to go steal stolen goods and then ditch 'em off at a point of location for the distribution.

- About how many, give or take, how many cars are, how many times does that happen that the flock camera is, or the cameras are finding a stolen car?

I mean, is that a daily occurrence?

Is that?

- You know, Eric, I don't know.

I don't know.

I look at the numbers from the county and they're all up all over the county.

So I don't know what the number is.

- In Bartlett specifically.

We'll move to, you mentioned economic development.

There's a number of big things we'll talk about, real estate development and property development.

But also I wanna talk a bit about Ford and Blue Oval City, the big Ford plant that's going in at what I still call the Memphis Megasite.

But Blue Oval City, you are one of the, Bartlett's very close.

It is expected, and maybe is already seeing development as a result of the many people, the thousands and thousands of people who'd be there for, I think some 25,000 for construction, and employees could be well over 10,000 between Ford, the battery plant, suppliers.

Many of those are expected to move to suburbs like Arlington, Lakeland, and Bartlett.

How do you guys look at that?

I'm sure you look at it positively, but there's always challenges with growth.

So what's your take?

- Well, one of the first things we did, we invited Blue Oval into my office and we went over their vision, their perspective, and where they was needed.

And every time, over the past two or three years, that they've met in the suburbs, they've, you know, what can we do?

What do we need?

And two things is housing and we need the qualified people that knows how to work in that type of environment.

And we just invested, a couple of years ago, into having a TCAT academy built there in Bartlett, right there at Appling and Brother.

And it started the first classes, I think late fall and early this year.

- TCAT being, again, people not as close to it, TCAT is Tennessee-- - Tennessee College of Applied Technology.

It's where, in Bartlett we've got, I'm told that we have around 30 kids, or young men and women, that's in the 9th grade to the 12th grade, that they can go and they can take auto mechanics, C&C machine building, and welding, and a lot of array of those classes.

And while they're in high school, they get credits to go to a vo-tech school like that.

So the opportunities really come back to where the youth that are in school now, I think the perspective for them going and getting into a good paying job is brighter than it's ever been, even before Blue Oval come in, particularly with the medical device industry there in Bartlett.

- Yeah, you have a very big, for people not familiar, it's a big industry in Bartlett, and has been for decades now.

- Yes, sir, it is.

And we're told through the Chamber that Warsaw, Indiana is the largest medical device community in the nation, and we're second to that.

And rapidly closing in on that.

- In terms of housing, and you talked about Blue Oval needing housing, Bartlett has grown massively over recent decades.

That growth has slowed, but this will probably see another, some kind of influx of people in construction.

Well, looking back, and you're a home builder by trade, by profession.

What do you, when you look back at the growth, and you've lived in Bartlett, I think 40 something years now.

You've been on the Board of Alderman for 20 years, so you've seen explosive growth.

What have you learned, what went right, and what, as you look at another wave of growth, and we'll talk some about sewers and the issues around that.

But just you look at the past, what did you learn, and how do you wanna do things maybe differently or the same going forward?

- Well, graduating in Bartlett High School and driving down there, I have, I think it was probably less than 10,000, and now we're approaching 60,000.

The one thing that I feel like that maybe we could have, we didn't adapt to, is respond to changing in housing habits.

And I don't think there was enough diversity in our housing stock.

Back during the prime, back in the '90s, and when it was really booming, basically you could go into most majority of our subdivisions and they was all within the same parameters of square footage and they all looked a lot alike.

I've had one realtor tell me that I could take a client, put him in a car and drive into five subdivisions in Bartlett, and unfold the blind, and they really wouldn't think they left the first subdivision.

Unlike many of our sister communities, I mean the diversity in the housing is, I think, stymying us.

And you know, for years and years in the building community, we've always said that your home value is only as good as your local school.

And for a long time, you go back 20 or 30 years, the idea is, we need bigger lots.

Bigger lots draw bigger houses.

And so what you see in a lot of the communities now, people don't want those big houses.

Or they want a larger houses with homeowner associations that reduces the maintenance and upkeep on that.

- Yeah, so you also have had big debates on, and other communities, this is not unique to Bartlett, debates and conversations about apartments.

And apartments and mixed income, where there's mixed use, apartments and retail, in a much denser kind of environment.

Germantown had apartment moratorium for a period of time because there was just concerns about, was Germantown going in the right direction, and debate among citizens.

Where are you on that?

I mean, what is it?

Union Depot is a big a hundred million plus development, that's right?

- $170 million.

- So talk, for people not familiar, I mean, what was the debate about over that development?

And it went through, it was approved, so what does that mean for the future of Bartlett?

- Well, to dovetail on what I just said, that is a mixed-use development.

And it's been a while.

I can't even remember the last apartments that was built in Bartlett.

It's been a while.

I think the ones out by the Interstate 40.

But actually Keith put us all in a car.

- Former mayor, Keith McDonald.

- Former mayor Keith McDonald was looking at that, and I think two or three years ago, because the model had shifted.

It's even shifted on a national level to where the big box stores aren't looking for a mall.

Then it was an indoor mall, then we went to an outdoor mall.

And we went up and visited a lot of places that had residential mixed use, kinda like you're talking about, kinda like a seaside type theme.

And people just don't, people are so busy.

You're finding the lifestyle where the husband and the wife are working and the days of coming home and spending all day shared in the yard, pulling weeds, and cutting grass, and trimming trees.

So I think the residential mixed use is allowing a different type of housing that this particular Union Depot will have some single family homes in it that will start about 2,200 to 2,600 square feet.

The starting prices, I'm told, is in the lower fours, and will have a clubhouse.

So you got single family, you actually have a condo style of living there, too, that will be owner occupied.

And then we'll have some lofts that they call 350 lofts, four stories tall.

Then we'll have some lofts with some retail space below that.

So we're finding, and then there's three or four out parcels that front on Highway 70 in front of that.

So what they're finding is, is these national chains and even the local people, they want to be in up and close to the people, give it that neighborhood feel.

In the day of the big box store with Amazon, I mean you call 1-800-Amazon now and get anything delivered to your door.

- Well, the controversy was about the, I mean, some people just don't like apartments.

They really, and again, this is not unique to Bartlett, it's been debated in Memphis, it's been debated, it still is in some developments that go in in the city of Memphis, and obviously Germantown had that moratorium, other communities, is about, you want owner occupied versus people who rent, and some perception that renters are more transient.

And I mean, do you look forward to Union Depot and future Union Depots, and allaying the concerns of citizens about what it means to have a different type of housing going into Bartlett?

- We did some studying, and I asked our police chief to get us some data on that.

And I think one of the key differences that we're finding out, it's a model that's everywhere, is that most citizens convey apartments the way they was built 30 years ago.

It's an apartment complex.

And so obviously, with that perception, they think crime's gonna go up because of various reasons that are usually associated with an independent apartment complex.

But we did a study, and you find these people to where there's people owner occupied there, and some lofts they call them, living there.

And not only that, there'd be no Section 8 housing in there.

And the prices that I think you saw in the paper two or three weeks ago, it's so expensive now that it's an apartment, and the model, the way apartments are viewed has changed.

And that life, that style of living is catching on everywhere.

So I think a big issue is, and then you talk about home values.

I had one individual that was abutting that call me and just said, "Hey, I feel like our home values are going to drop."

And I said, "Well, can I ask you, "what do you think your house is worth, and how big is your house?"

And we did the multiplier and did the dollars per square foot.

And I said, "Do you realize that these houses are about $25 or $30 a foot higher than yours?"

So I think we're going to see it's going to stabilize the housing market and meet the need of the diversity that Bartlett's been looking for a long time.

- Yeah, one of the...

I did a debate with y'all during, what was it, last summer I think it was, during the campaign.

And as we were getting ready for that and I was getting up to speed on all the issues in Bartlett, one of the big issues is sewers.

And actually sewers, it sounds like things people not only don't think about, maybe don't want to think about.

But you as mayor, and this goes from city mayor to Bartlett mayor, to county, the sewers, they are a part of development, they're a part of economic growth.

They were a big issue in terms of Ford going into, you know, this billion dollar plant going in.

So you all have challenges in terms of sewer construction that has to happen to feed it.

We don't have to get too far in the weeds of this, but it's a big lift.

It's a lot of money.

Where are you in terms of the plan, and the spending, and the timing for expanding the sewer system in Bartlett?

- I'm glad you asked that, Eric, because that was a concern that our previous mayor had.

And as an alderman we followed the lead.

The alderman, our duties are just legislatively.

And we understood, as Alderman then, that the mayor is the chief executive officer who made those decisions, and he worked with Mayor Strickland.

And through the process of years of talking, it just seemed like it kind of got stalemated, I think.

And so what we wanted to try to do is just say, hey, let's open the doors back up, open the doors to communication back up with the mayor.

I met with Mayor Strickland in January, and it was a very good meeting.

There was, it seemed, we had cooperation to partner on both sides.

Both of us had the whole end game.

So from that meeting in January, I actually have, trying to set up another meeting with Jim, or the mayor, this next week.

So where did we go from there?

We reestablished some communication lines.

We found ways that we could partner, that we could move forward from the stalemate.

And we're very excited that we identified a couple of areas that next week we'll be talking about on, that will open up some areas in and around the Union Depot property.

- Open up for future, for other development?

- Yes, so there's a 30-plus acre parcel that's across the street that we've had a lot of interest in that was basically turned away because of lack of sewer.

And this will fix that area down there.

So I'm hoping here in the next month or so that we can reach an agreement on that.

We have an RFQ out for engineers to start that process and that pricing process on that.

We've also put out an RFQ for some of the sewer analysis on the other distribution point.

About 62% of the sewer in Bartlett goes to Memphis to treat.

So I'm excited to say we do have a plan.

The immediate plan is to try to fix what we call the bottleneck at 64 and Highway 70.

And secondly, it's moved down to the Fletcher Creek Basin, which will open up a lot of the properties that are in the industrial development park.

Most of that basin basically goes from city hall all the way out to the interstate.

So that basin out there, we're beginning to do sewer analysis to check the effluent and so forth that comes out of there.

- Yeah, and then part of, does Bartlett, I should know this, but I get lost, does Bartlett pay the city for processing?

- Yes.

- The sewage, okay.

Then the other issue was that Memphis, at one point, and maybe this is what you've been negotiating with, with Mayor Strickland, who will be on the show actually next week, holding tanks, that you'll build massive holding tanks, there's a massive one under Union Depot, to kind of mitigate when sewage is flowing into the Memphis system.

Is that the details that you all are working out is what those holding tanks are, and how big they will be, and all that?

Or is it really just a price issue of what it's gonna cost, or what Memphis is gonna get paid to handle Bartlett's sewage?

- All the above.

- All the above, okay.

- To be particular, the bottleneck that we call it, we're looking for a solution that we think will eliminate the future need for the tanks in that one location down there.

There are two tanks on Union Depot that have been worked out, and those, part of the problem is those two tenant sewer lines come together, and where they adjoin, the exiting, they don't enter to the proper- Now another proper size pipe that will handle that effluent.

Going down toward Fletcher Creek down there, one of the things that we worked out, even before we'd been told, it's gonna take one large holding tank.

And then in our conversation in January, Jim was saying that they're willing to work with us to let us phase that in as development occurs.

So that was a huge relief to us right there.

- Do you have any kind of price tag on this?

I mean, is this a $10 million project?

Is it a $100 million project?

- Those size tanks are relatively new, and by the time we get through it, we think it's gonna be in the $25-30 million range.

- And it is budget season for you.

And so for some perspective, your annual budget I think that you put forward is about $206 million.

Is that about right or did I get that wrong?

- Well, if you count the schools.

- With the schools, yeah.

About a hundred of that is the schools.

So just so people have a perspective on what y'all are spending.

- To be correct, I think we'll be south of 200.

- You think it'd be south of 200, okay.

The other priorities for you, we talked, I mean sewers have been this big, lingering question.

We talked about Ford.

The other business growth, I mean in terms of recruiting business, when you go and say, hey, people should move their business to Bartlett, or start a business, or expand, what is your pitch to them?

And we have about five minutes left here.

- So we wanna try to make that as easy and user friendly with our planning, fire, and codes number one.

That's for new businesses coming in there, and even so we're seeing a lot of remodels.

One of the things that we did, we not only talked about future growth, but we wanted to make sure that we went back to existing vacancies and we were working with the Chamber to work with ours, joins our work to try to go back and to fill those empty spots, go back through there.

- Yeah, just sticking with schools for a second, Bartlett has five schools, is that correct?

- Eleven.

- Eleven, like I said eleven, I mean yeah, eleven school buildings, sorry.

Do you all see growth in the number of buildings?

I mean, do you see that you're, and again looking at Blue Oval, and housing and employees moving in there, does that create, I mean, again, good problems to have, but is that a challenge that you've gotta expand the schools in any way?

- I just met with the school superintendent, David Stevens, on Monday, and that topic come up, and we think we're sufficient.

'Cause a lot of, even the new school, we accommodated for a lot of that growth in those expansions that we've done.

- The other question I had was, you talked about working with Jim Strickland, the other, County Mayor Lee Harris, the other suburban mayors, how much communication and coordination goes on among you all?

- Well, since, I think we've met three times.

The suburban mayors meet quarterly.

We've had two meetings so far this year, and this last meeting we had Doug McGowan in and the DA in.

So there's a lot of communication, a lot of coordination, particularly this year with the state shared sales tax.

- Yeah, talk about that.

- So for Bartlett, very briefly, since there's just time left, when we took away, they increased the state share from 6% to 7%.

They kept that 1% and then increased the single article cap from $1,600 to $3,200.

They kept 100% of that increase.

And so what we're asking for is to be able to give our share, our pro rata share of those two items back to us.

- From the state?

- From the state.

- And did you get that?

Did not get that done in this legislative session?

- We've, I think this is two years running, and we've asked the question that, that's where the sales tax is generated, and with the amount of surplus that the state has now, what's keeping them from letting us have that back?

- Yeah, and that's one where I think Jim Strickland has been, I think you all are in alignment on that.

- Yes, we are.

- And the state's response is what?

- It's... - No.

- No.

[Eric laughs] - Yeah, okay.

So you keep working that problem.

- Keep working.

- Yeah, go ahead.

- And you know, it's just real simple.

If you can't afford it now, when are you gonna be able to afford it?

It's not a priority.

And we've been told they're trying to give it back to us in different ways, and so.

- Last question on, we were talking about rentals and apartment rentals.

You are one of the communities, it's come up many times over the years of the idea of a rental registry.

And where do you stand?

This would be a registry of communities in Memphis, in Shelby County, really I think across the state, except Nashville.

Nashville is the only city, town, that has a rental registry where there is an actual database of, this house is a rental house, this house is owner-occupied, et cetera.

That may sound like not a big deal, but it has big impacts on communities like Bartlett, and people would say even Memphis.

- Yes, it does.

- So are you in favor of a rental registry, and what benefits would that have for y'all?

- Well, number one, our codes department has been trying to keep up with that as it is.

And we're just constitutional, we wanna make constitutional, we wanna make sure we're on good ground with that registration.

And the devil's in the details, as they say.

And so of that registry, there's a lot of people, individuals that may own two or three, four rental homes.

And then there's companies that comes in that has a big umbrella of rental homes.

So do you discriminate and say, hey, we want guys that, where do you start that?

Anybody that has a rental home?

Or is it 5, 10, where's the multiplier?

Where do you start to work?

At what point do you start that registry?

And then, does the registry open up ways to, for yearly inspections and fees and so forth?

- Would you look at a different tax rate in the ideal world?

I mean, I know other people have talked about that, that rental homes are almost quasi-commercial and so the tax rate should be different in some way.

- I don't know, 'cause I'll really be honest, 'cause right now our tax structure, either your residential or your commercial.

And there's a, how do you go into a residential neighborhood and identify that as a commercial piece of property?

And that opens up a lot of discussion, too.

So I'm open minded.

Obviously I'd like to see owner-occupied homes in Bartlett, and that brings a lot better quality of life historically for everybody.

I think there's just a lot of questions constitutionally, and how do you implement that, and what's the end game to try to restrict?

- Okay.

David Parsons, thank you very much.

Again, congratulations, and we'll certainly have you back as things go forward.

But that is all the time we have this week.

Thanks very much for joining us.

If you missed any of the show, you can get the full episode online, WKNO.org, or on YouTube, or as a podcast.

And again, as I said, Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland next week.

Thanks very much and we'll see you then.

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